Crafting an annual plan is like getting a bill through Congress. Behind the final numbers and strategies lie countless hours of spreadsheet crunching, hallway meetings, and waterfall charts. We debate assumptions, broker compromises, and eventually settle on a plan that is wrong the moment it’s inked.

A finance director once told me that “spending more time on planning won’t make the numbers more accurate; it just makes the numbers wrong to the penny.”

It’s important to know the business inside and out and have a clear trajectory where we’re headed. But there is a point where planning becomes overplanning. All that time spent planning is time spent not doing.

We need to accept that there will be risk and uncertainty in any worthwhile plan. We don’t make that risk go away by crunching the spreadsheet yet another time. Instead, once we plan what we know, we should set the plan aside. Apply that time, energy, and focus on coming up with bigger ideas and making things happen. Place a few audacious unpredictable bets. Minimize the risk by maximizing the upside.

Earlier this year, I met Ian Sanders briefly at South By Southwest. Ian gave an inspiring talk on the merits of Unplanning. Here’s his Unplan manifesto, which includes a brilliant quote from Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts:

“A company’s success can be measured on an inverse ratio to the amount of time it spends on traditional strategic planning.”Unplan Your Business

Henry Ford famously said, “if I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse'”.

Many businesses treat focus groups as prophetic. Whether looking for inspiration or validation, they give staggering authority to eight strangers gathered on the other side of a one-way mirror. After one particularly idea-sapping focus group, a creative director leaned over to me and said, “do you think these eight women realize how much power they have?” We jokingly referred to them as the Oracles of Eden Prairie.

Focus groups have their place in the field of consumer insights. Yet they are poorly equipped to answer many questions, particularly involving innovations that are dramatically different from what has been done before. It’s rare that remarkable or unique business ideas originate in an eight-member focus group. Most consumers don’t really know what they want, and if they do, they have a difficult time articulating it.

HBS professor Gerald Zaltman first opened my eyes to the power of a non-focus group approach in consumer research. He created a process called the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) to unearth consumer insights that are deeper than consumers know how to articulate themselves. We experimented with these techniques in the classroom. Dan Pink wrote a great profile on Zaltman that captures the value of this approach:

“People can give us only what we give them the opportunity to provide,” Zaltman says. “To the extent that we structure the stimulus – whether it’s a discussion guide in a focus group or a question in a survey – all people can do is respond. And there’s value in that. But I see those as strip-mining techniques. Sometimes the valuable ore is on the surface. But often it’s not. Strip-mining techniques are inappropriate when there’s a great deal more depth to be had. Typically, the deeper you go, the more value there is.”

Asking the Oracles of Eden Prairie to tell you what they want is a good technique if you’re in the “faster horse” business. But, if you’re trying to create something meaningfully different, experiment with research methods that are also meaningfully different.

I recently heard someone referred to as a “seagull manager”, a term Ken Blanchard coined in 1985: “seagull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, then fly out.”

This conversation prompted a discussion on bad managers of all stripes. Everyone at the table had a top-of-mind example. I grouped some of the most common offenders into this cartoon.

If bad management is so readily visible, why are their so many culprits? Part of it I think is that many managers are oblivious to their impact on others. One of my friends quit a job specifically because of an abusive manager, and that manager not only showed up to her going-away party, he tried to friend her on LinkedIn and even asked for a reference later on. He was completely oblivious to the perception that others had of him, even though he was ultimately fired because of the number of abuse complaints against him.

It reminds me of that old expression, “confidence without competence is arrogance.” Many managers achieve positions of leadership and don’t recognize that leading a team is something they might not innately know how to do. They don’t recognize that they haven’t gained competence.

The truth is that leading teams is incredibly hard. Very few are naturally good at it. It takes humility and continuous practice to get better. It’s an exercise of progress, not perfection. One of my friends took a new position and gave each member of his team the coffee mug on the right. A self-deprecating attitude is a good place to start.

In the social media bandwagon, brands place a lot of emphasis on the absolute number of friends, fans, and followers. They treat that number as a proxy for how well the brand is reaching its audience. The assumption is the bigger the number, the more effective the outreach.

Six years ago, Häagen-Dazs followed a consumer landgrab strategy with a loyalty program that aimed to build a 500,000 member database of “loyalists”. The focus was on quantity, not quality, and the tactics to grow the audience were close to bribery. Consumers received lucrative incentives and monthly gifts to agree to be on the list. However, it was a shallow connection at best. The profile became deal hunters, not true brand loyalists. Häagen-Dazs ultimately killed the program when they discovered that a 500,000 member database of shallow names actually held very little value.

The same dynamic is happening now with social media. Seth Godin argues that “viral growth trumps lots of faux followers” in an interesting post earlier this year:

“Many brands and idea promoters are in a hurry to rack up as many Facebook fans and Twitter followers as they possibly can. Hundreds of thousands if possible. A lot of these fans and followers are faux. Sunny day friends… A slightly better idea defeats a much bigger but disconnected user base every time. The lesson: spend your time coming up with better ideas, not with more (faux) followers.”

Some brands make a mistake at the other extreme by blowing all the stops on a tiny group of influencers. One brand I know created ridiculously expensive branded environments to reach twelve consumers at a time. They identified these twelve as influencers and banked that they would spread the word to many, many more. While impactful to those who participated, you obviously can’t build a brand efficiently reaching only dozens of consumers at a time.

The right balance is to be both high-touch and high-scale. My favorite example is gDiapers, which taps a willing base of gMums to help spread the word. These advocates even go so far as to conduct in-store demos on behalf of gDiapers for free because they love the mission of the brand so much. Co-founder Jason Graham-Nye didn’t create the progam from scratch. He didn’t set out to create a 500,000 member database. Instead, he discoverd that consumers had self-organized a Yahoo group to talk about the brand and he simply looked for ways to channel that passion. A remarkable product proposition had to come first.

Whether on package copy, TV ads, or websites, most brands talk in the same self-referential and self-absorbed way. It’s by design. That’s usually the first filter of a creative review: run through a checklist to make sure that all the key benefits from the brief are there. The problem is that there’s rarely a filter that all that brand talk is actually interesting.

Hugh Macleod refers to this as The Cocktail Party Rule: “what’s true at cocktail parties is also true in marketing i.e. If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. If you want to be interesting, talk about something else.”

Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, once said that “advertising is a tax for unremarkable thinking”. Most brands invest in Paid Media to interrupt their consumers long enough to blab about their brand message, whether or not it’s ultimately that interesting to them. Consumers’ collective eyes glaze over in a blah blah blah world and it becomes harder and harder to get your message across.

TBWA identifies four types of Media available to brands: Paid, Earned, Owned, and Created. Most brands only think about Paid Media, but Earned Media is a much better litmus test. Is your brand doing or saying something interesting enough that consumers and the press are compelled enough to share it? Consumers and the press share ideas, not because the ideas convey key benefits from your creative brief, but because it’s interesting to them.

Owned and Created Media is an even higher bar because it requires communication to be less about the brand and more about the consumers through the brand. My favorite example is the American Express OPEN Forum, a community and resource for small business owners. There is no overt pitch of the brand benefits of American Express to a small business owner. They don’t need one. They say everything you need to know about American Express through a conversation that is about the consumer, not the card.

Increasing your working media budget is not enough to get your message into the world if your message isn’t interesting enough to share on it’s own. Media is just an accelerant.

I recently heard someone refer to their legal department as a “Sales Prevention Department”. I realized that most businesses have some sort of “idea prevention department”, whether they nickname it the “VP of We Can’t” or the “Abominable No Men”. These are the alarmists who are so focused on what can go wrong that they miss the big picture. When every risk is magnified with a telephoto lens, it sometimes feels safer to stand still.

When you are championing an idea in an organization, you have to win over the “Abominable No Men”. Some of this comes through asking for forgiveness rather than permission. But a lot of this requires selling inside, which is often more important than selling outside.

Almost ten years ago, I experienced my first introduction to large corporate legal teams. Gaining approval on ideas was notoriously tough. But I soon discovered that reviews went a lot smoother when I took the time to personally befriend the legal team and get to know their motivations. I learned that a lawyer named Josh played bass in a rock band on weekends and went by the nickname J-Low. I found it was a lot easier to champion an idea with J-Low because I knew him well enough to anticipate and overcome objections that came up.

It’s not always the lawyers. In fact, the best lawyers are mindful of risk, but also mindful of opportunity. I’ve worked with a number of lawyers who know how to weigh both sides of an idea and give a measured point of view. I’ve even worked with some who could create marketing opportunities out of legal challenges.

Every business needs both the opportunists and the risk mitigators, those who see the silver linings and those who see the storm clouds. A successful marketer sees both.

For many businesses, planning for 2011 is in full swing, particularly the horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target. The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable. The leadership team sets an top-down stretch target that is much higher. Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers.

There are a few schools of thought on where to draw the line in between. Set your target too low and you can reliably hit the number, but you may not have achieved anything remarkable. Set your target too high and it may spur you to breakthrough growth, but it will feel like failure if you then miss the number.

A plan is outdated the moment it’s inked. Things change: customers change their minds, new opportunities surface, roadblocks appear. The key to hitting a plan is having a constant list of upsides to chase and downsides to mitigate so that you have contingiencies. I once saw a plan with a long list of downsides, but no upsides. Someone asked why the team hadn’t come up with a list of upsides. It turned out that they had, but they then baked the upsides into the plan. They then had nowhere to go when bad news inevitably came.

The best plans are neither sandbagged or full of hot air. They find the right equilibrium in between. But, they then provide extra incentives to the team for beating plan by different levels. This approach motivates the team to find breakthrough growth, but not at the expense to morale of having a plan perpetually out-of-reach.

Beta releases used to be restricted to small groups of Beta testers. A Beta release allowed you to work out the bugs before a general market release. When a product shipped, it was considered final until the next release.

Nowadays, many products are in perpetual Beta (and we’re all Beta testers). Gmail, Flickr and del.icio.us carry the Beta designation for years at a time as the products are developed and refined in the open. This creates a mindset of continuous improvement and treats users as co-developers. The pace of innovation happens so quickly that traditional release cycles don’t apply.

This perpetual Beta mindset was born in web-based product development, but it’s instructive for anyone in business. As Olivier Blanchard outlines:

“What does being in Beta mean? It means being in perpetual test mode. It means constantly asking “how could I do this better,” even when this worked just fine. How can I listen better? How could I improve customer service? How can I make my billing process smoother? How could we improve the UI/UX of our websites? How can I engage my user community even better? How could this brochure have been better?”

When I worked at Dreyer’s, we talked about “Ready, Fire, Aim” as our development philosophy. We fired quickly for speed to market and then perpetually improved our aim. The overlooked word is “ready”, which is important to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Apple recently discovered that their are limits to what consumers will tolerate in bleeding edge products. While Apple never describes its live product launches as Beta, consumers often put up with bugs as the cost of being an early adopter. When the antenna failed on the iPhone 4, the consumer backlash was deafening. Apple learned that consumers may be prepared to put up with shoddy battery life, but the antenna snafu crossed the line. They also learned that their blame-shifting response to the crisis (asking consumers to hold their phone differently) only fanned the fire.

“One of the other interesting characteristics about always being in beta is accepting that mistakes are going to happen. And preparing for them. And thinking about, maybe, trying to turn them into opportunities. Flickr’s attempt to turn a ‘we’re down’ message into fun probably annoyed some people but I liked it are clearly so did lots of other people. When you’re moving at the speed that the modern world demands mistakes are inevitable. Being surprised by them shouldn’t be. Mistakes are also when the veneer tends to slip, if there is a veneer. The authentic voice of a brand or organisation is exposed when something goes wrong, if it’s not the same as the voice you normally speak with people will notice.”

One of my favorite new brands is designed entirely around an “Always in Beta” mindset: BetaBrand, in San Francisco. Every Tuesday at noon, they announce a new limited-edition fashion invention to their mailing list. This week, it’s the World’s First Farmer’s Market Backpack. BetaBrand continually releases new products and invites consumers to participate. Only selling online allows them to have weekly limited-edition launches as a physical product. Small-batch local production allows them a product development cycle that is only six weeks long.

My friend Michelle introduced me to the expression, Jumping the Shark, which is used to describe “the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise.” It comes from the fifth season of the classic American sitcom, Happy Days, when Fonzie donned swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket to perform a ridiculous water ski jump over a shark.

The guy who coined the expression describes it as “a defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on…it’s all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it ‘Jumping the Shark.’ From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same.”

Indiana Jones “jumped the shark” in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when Indiana was hit by a nuclear weapon blast while hiding in a lead-lined fridge. While the fridge was hurled a great distance and everything else was obliterated, Indiana emerged unscathed. This lead to a similar expression, “Nuking the Fridge”, which was one of the top buzz words of 2008.

Brands and businesses “jump the shark” and “nuke the fridge” all the time, often in a desperate attempt to reignite growth. They abandon what made them successful and drive away their most loyal consumers.

In her wonderful book, Different, Youngme Moon applies “Jumping the Shark” to product categories, which often reach a point of product proliferation where they leave their consumers behind. Bottled water is a classic example of this.

“As these categories mature, the products within them get progressively better over time, with consumers benefiting along the way. But somewhere along the line these categories jump the shark, having undergone too many plot twists and turns for consumers to stomach any more.”

Youngme describes this as “a consumption trend that I contend is one of the most significant challenges facing business today.”

In the rush to maintain momentum, there is huge pressure to “jump the shark”. Jumping the shark attracts new attention and feels necessary in the game of competitive one-upmanship. But the volume of attention is far less important than the caliber of attention. And more important than grabbing fresh attention is maintaining the loyalty of those already buying.

The quickest way to rankle a creative director is to ask to make the logo bigger. It’s an age-old feud that has existed since the dawn of advertising. It’s often the first piece of feedback shared, and has even led to its own song:

“Make the logo as big as you can.
And make the logo bigger.
I don’t want to tell you how to do your job.
But, could you make the logo bigger?
Bigger, bigger, make it big.
Make the logo bigger.”

A bigger logo won’t fix a small brand. It won’t make a brand more remarkable. There is no direct correlation between the size of a logo and the effectiveness of an ad. But, in the qualitative world of creative review, it’s a tangible, quantitative response. So, marketers give this feedback a lot, even if it’s superficial and even if it detracts from the strength of the creative execution.

The deeper issue is usually that the ad doesn’t link closely enough to the brand, but the debate often devolves into a tug-o-war on logo size.

That said, branding has to be prominent enough to link a creative message to a brand. There is a difference between advertising and pure entertainment after all. Sometimes, a creative director, possibly anticipating a tug-o-war over logo size, starts off with an execution where the branding is so understated that consumers will never take away which brand was affiliated with it, no matter how entertaining the ad was.

One creative director tellingly puts it this way, “Little does the client realize that your final allegiance is not to them, but to the quality of the work, something that you cannot in good conscience permit them to jeopardize with their lack of taste.” He goes on to advise a sneaky con game on “How to make your client’s logo bigger without making their logo bigger” that somewhat resembles this other cartoon I drew in 2007.

In a classic Mexican stand-off like this, no one wins. Get past the standoff, and instead of arguing about something as superficial as logo size, you’ll have time to come up with ways to make your brand more impactful.

If you’re ever on a video shoot, you’ll no doubt hear someone say, “we’ll fix it in post-production”. This usually happens toward the end of a long day, when everyone is tired and there’s a sticking point preventing everyone from going home. Sometimes the client hasn’t seen what they’re looking for. Sometimes there’s a stalemate on art direction. The promise to fix “in post-production” allows everyone to break and address the problem later.

But it’s usually an empty promise. Post-production isn’t a magic wand. It can fine-tune, but it can’t resolve fundamental differences of opinion. It also can’t fix massive mistakes. When there’s a real sticking point, it’s better to buck up, make another pot of coffee, and do another take.

Contrast that approach with this 2003 Honda advert, Cog. It’s a 2-minute advert where disassembled pieces of a Honda Accord are laid out on a floor and an elaborate chain reaction is set in motion by one transmission bearing. What’s particularly stunning is that the team forced themselves to make the ad in two uninterrupted 60-second takes, without CGI. This required accuracy to a 16th of an inch and they had to overcome changes in ambient temperature and settling dust. It took 90 minutes just to get the first transmission bearing to roll correctly into the second. The whole piece required 606 takes, but the result is pure magic.

This ad wouldn’t have been nearly so remarkable had they faked it. Partly as a result of their exacting discipline to get it right on set, this Honda ad received more awards than any commercial in history.

In a general sense, businesses often operate as if there is post-production to rely on. There is a manufactured wall between how a business operates internally and how it is designed to be seen by the outside world.

I once heard someone say that working in the best businesses was like working on live TV. There’s no opportunity for post-production so you’d better be authentic the first time around. Remarkable things happen on live TV. The best brands brand from the inside out. And consumers are increasingly savvy enough to figure out the difference.

I’ve been hooked this week by Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin. Seth briefly profiles the Devil’s Advocate, which he describes as a “card-carrying member of the Resistance” — a force that prevents remarkable ideas from coming to life. In his blog, Seth occasionally advises his readers to “uninvite the devil’s advocate, since the devil doesn’t need one, he’s doing fine.”

The Devil’s Advocate is a regular staffer in most offices. “Let me play Devil’s Advocate” is a socially acceptable way to shoot down an idea. It’s a guise that allows anyone to criticize an idea without offering an alternative. It’s far easier (and safer) to tear down than to create. You can undermine what someone has just proposed without actually challenging them directly.

The Devil’s Advocate is over 400 years old. The Roman Catholic Church officially created the Advocatus Diaboli position in 1587 to be the official skeptic when debating sainthood applications. His job was to be the official naysayer: slander the candidate’s character and argue that the miracles were fraudulent.

In 1983, Pope John Paul abolished the Devil’s Advocate position. As a result of this reform, he was able to canonize 500 and beatify 1,300 people in his tenure, compared to only 98 canonizations from all of his predecessors in the 20th century.

When the Devil’s Advocate lost his job with the Church, he started to hang out in business meetings. Swap the process of canonizing saints to canonizing ideas, and you can see the wet blanket effect that this role creates. It’s very hard to overcome the Devil’s Advocate’s argument because belief in an idea is an act of faith, not just an act of proof. There will always be reasonable doubt and the Devil’s Advocate is there to seed it.

If the Roman Catholic Church can abolish the Devil’s Advocate, why not your business? That’s not to say that you remove critical thought from the idea vetting process. Just channel that critical thought through a positive lens. Force yourself to start every sentence with “Yes, and” to make the idea stronger, not weaker, by the composite effect of the crowd. Don’t offer criticism unless you have an alternative solution to share. And don’t be afraid to take leaps of faith. Not all remarkable ideas can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

In your next meeting, ban the Devil’s Advocate and invite the Angel’s Advocate instead.

I learned the power of archetypes from Joseph Campbell’s classic interview with Bill Moyers. The explore the universal themes, characters, and stories that repeat throughout history, appearing in every form of human expression from the Bible to Star Wars. These archetypes repeat because they resonate deeply with human consciousness.

I first saw Joseph Campbell’s work applied to brands at General Mills, when the Wheaties team worked hard to understand and unlock “The Hero” archetype. I then learned that TBWA/Chiat used the archetypes as part of their exploratory work with brands.

Not surprisingly, some of the most meaningful brands have tapped universal archetypes. These brands stand for something powerful to the consumers who buy them.

Nike –> The Hero

Harley Davidson –> The Outlaw

Pampers –> The Helper

Virgin –> The Jester

Ben & Jerry’s –> The Innocent

Patagonia –> The Adventurer

Charles Schwab –> The Sage

And so on

Marketers spend a lot of time drafting brand pyramids, positioning statements, and messaging. Most of these are wordsmithing exercises. What can be more powerful is to understand your brand archetype. Mapping your brand to an archetype forces you to choose. The best brands narrow to one or two archetypes. Without narrowing, a brand is trying to be all things to all people. It ends up standing for nothing. When brands stand for nothing, the only way it can compete is on price.

Last week, I heard Dan Germain give a talk about innocent (the UK smoothie business where he is Head of Creative). Not surprisingly, innocent represents “The Innocent” archetype, with it’s fresh-eyed approach to the beverage market. As part of the brand history, Dan shared that the brand was first called “Fast Tractor”, not “innocent”. They created a smoothie with a short time from field to bottle, and “Fast Tractor” reinforced that positioning. “Fast Tractor” may fit a positioning statement, but does it stand for something greater?

Later on, they migrated to “innocent”, which tapped a universal archetype. The brand emerged with a similar playbook as Ben & Jerry’s, and consumers instantly knew what it meant.

The very first Saturday Night Live in 1975 featured a mock-commercial with George Carlin making fun of the Gillette Trac II, which was the first two-blade razor. SNL spoofed it with a fake three-blade razor called the Triple-Trac, and closed with a tagline, “The Triple-Trac. Because You’ll Believe Anything”.

Twenty-three years later, in 1998, Gillette launched the Mach3 razor, the first three-blade razor. I heard a Gillette executive give a talk about the Mach3 soon after launch, and he talked in gushing terms about the innovation. When it came time for questions, someone in the audience asked, “What’s next? 4 blades? 5 blades?” Everyone in the room laughed … except for the guy from Gillette. He replied in complete seriousness, “I can’t comment”.

As it turns out, Wilkinson/Schick launched a four-blade Quattro in 2004, which prompted The Onion to poke fun at the Gillette president with a mock-commentary, “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades”. And then three years later in 2006, Gillette actually launched a five-blade razor, the Fusion, along with a motorized five-blade version called Fusion Power. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Feature proliferation is the name of the game in new product development. Most innovation in the market is composed of incremental improvements to what’s been done before. Yet those new features often outpace what the consumers actually want. In the case of the Fusion, Gillette had to launch a marketing campaign specifically targeted to their own Mach3 consumers. Instead of campaigning to steal share from competitors, they had to practically beg their own consumers who were plenty happy with the earlier Mach3 to upgrade to the more expensive Fusion. They over-served the market.

As Clayton Christensen argues in the Innovator’s Dilemma, the best move when the market is over-served is to innovate from below, not to join the new feature arms race. Less can be more. Simplicity is the killer app.

The Economist ran a recent article on this effect in consumer technology, “In Praise of Techno-Austerity”:

“There are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatique among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis”.

This feature fatique carries to every consumer market, which creates opportunity for brands that think outside the new feature arms race. My favorite recent innovation is Vibram Five Fingers, a barefoot running shoe. Rather than engage in the feature one-up-manship of Nike and Adidas, Vibram launched a minimalist product that completely rethinks the nature of a running shoe.

How can you launch the Five Fingers, Wii, or Flip for your category? Focus your energy there, not on adding a sixth or seventh razor blade.

Last week I joined one of the better idea generation exercises I’ve experienced in a while. We split into small groups and toured the San Francisco Ferry Building to scout out retail merchandising ideas. The Ferry Building is packed with novel, funky shops like a Far West Fungi, which only sells mushrooms: dried mushrooms, fresh mushrooms, mushroom ice cream — everything conceivably mushroom-related except for the psychedelic variety. You can learn a lot from experimental retail concepts like that.

As we debriefed afterwards, it struck me that the real challenge is the period after the brainstorm ends. When you distill your notes and pack away the flipcharts and sticky notes, how do you bring the ideas to life without losing momentum and creativity?

As we return to the realties of our day jobs at the end of a brainstorm, we run into road blocks, inertia, committees and other hazards that can water down ideas or shut them down entirely. That’s what organizations do well. They are designed to minimize risk. Bringing an idea to life can feel like making it through a circuitous maze. So much emphasis with innovation is placed on the up-front brainstorm, yet the real acid test is in the day-to-day shepherding of the idea through the organization.

Thomas Edison famously observed “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”. Scott Belsky was inspired by this insight to launch a think tank and conference series called The 99 Percent, which has very useful guidance on making it through that maze without giving up. Business creativity is not about brainstorming. It’s about persevering.

I had a “Lost in Translation” moment a couple weeks ago in a meeting with 20 French and Russian executives. It was the first time I’d ever been in a meeting where someone simultaneously translated the discussion into ear pieces. I spent the whole meeting wondering if they really understood what we were trying to communicate. Many of my jokes fell flat and their questions back (through the same translator) seemed like non-sequiturs.

This language gap made me think of the cultural gap that exists in business, particularly around innovation. We may all speak English in business life, but that doesn’t mean that we speak the same language. Innovation that challenges the status quo is particularly foreign.

I once took a class with Clayten Christensen, who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and coined the term disruptive innovation. He described that businesses typically ignore disruptive innovations. Even if they recognize a disruptive innovation, they are reluctant to take advantage of it, because it threatens their existing business. Often they wait to take action until it is too late.

While taking this class, my bike route took me past the Polaroid headquarters in Cambridge. They were a classic case of a business that ignored a disruptive innovation in digital photography. As if to prove Christensen’s point, Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection midway through the class. Failing to acknowledge a disruptive innovation ultimately led to the demise of the company.

When trying to advance any form of innovation that challenges the status quo, we have to recognize the cultural intertia that will block those types of projects. Without overcoming the translation gap, those ideas will never get off the ground.

We can thank adman Alex Osbourne for the Brainstorm (he’s the O in the agency BBDO). Alex invented the Brainstorm in 1939 as an alternative to the usual meetings of “discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination”.

Alex Osbourne realized that an environment is needed where judgement is suspended and ideas have space to grow. As part of the attitude adjustment, Brainstorm facilitators run through the same set of stock Brainstorming rules: there’s no such thing as a bad idea, quantity counts over quality, encourage wild ideas, etc. These rules help attendees shift mental gears from their regular work state of mind.

Those Brainstorming rules everyone agrees to at the beginning of the Brainstorm evaporate the moment we leave that conference room door at the Hilton. Idea generation is one part of the creative process, not the entire process. Brainstorming a mountain of sticky notes with ideas will not overcome the organizational cuts that occur as the ideas are developed.

I toured an IDEO office recently and it’s clear that they live the spirit of suspended judgement each and every day, not just during a scheduled Brainstorm. It’s in their DNA. Imagination continues as the idea develops all the way to completion, even as options are narrowed and choices are made. This everyday business creativity is inherently more enduring than what most companies accomplish in a one-day offsite.

Instead of focusing on the quantity of ideas developed at the front-end of the process, organizations should apply effort to continued creativity as ideas are developed. We should question why our regular office environment promotes “discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination”.

Until we solve that more glaring issue, any Brainstorming rules to suspend judgement are superficial are short-lived. The real goal afterall is not just creative ideas at the end of a Brainstorm, but more imaginative products and services that reach consumers and customers. It’s idea development, not idea generation, that counts.

ADHD isn’t just for teenagers. It afflicts businesses and teams too. I once heard a venture capitalist offer to prescribe Ritalin to one of his portfolio companies.

It’s easy to get distracted by the Shiny New Thing. It’s particularly easy to get distracted when the going gets tough on your core plan and energy starts to wane. Whether it’s a new technology, a new product, or a new customer, falling in love with the Shiny New Thing can take a team off course. It’s easy to get enthusiastic about the promise of something new than the hard slog of what you’re already doing.

Ted Simon calls this Shiny New Object Syndrome (particularly common with social media): “In this headlong rush of confusing a tactic with a strategy, organizations waste time, energy, resources chasing a “shiny new object.” By skipping these questions the organization can find itself distracted from its main goal and/or mission.”

That’s not to say that teams should be inflexible and wear blinders to opportunities that come up mid-stream. Being adaptable to new opportunities is important. But don’t lose sight of the main goal.

Dharmesh Shah writes a great advice post for entrepreneurs in particular:

To really succeed and get things done, you’re going to need to stick to something and get the basic machinery “working” and plug away at it. Good ideas take time. Great ideas take even more time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you be stubborn about your idea, business model, product, whatever. Far from it. I’m a big fan of the agile approach to startups. But, there’s a difference between iterating on an existing thing and being distracted by a Shiny New Thing.

So, here’s my advice to you the next time you see the Shiny New Thing bug buzzing around your head as you’re trying to get real work done. Ask yourself the following 4 questions:

1. Am I simply intrigued by the shininess and newness, or is there really a there, there?

2. What would I need to know and what minimal questions would I need answered to figure out whether this Shiny New Thing is worth my attention?

3. How long will it reasonably take me to figure out what I need to know? Can I even afford that investment? How does it impact what I’m doing now?

4. Should I go ahead and….Hey wait! As I was writing this, I just came across another topic for this blog as a result of something on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Must…try…to…resist…shiny…new…thing. Oh no…it’s too…shinyyyyyyyy….[click]

I’m enjoying Rework, the entrepreneurial handbook by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson, founders of 37signals. I was inspired to read it after meeting Mark Rohde, who drew all of the illustrations.

One of the brilliant riffs in the book is titled, “Nobody likes plastic flowers”. Jason and David lobby for the beauty of imperfection and advocate the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi. They illustrate wabi-sabi with a wonderful quote by Leonard Koren:

“Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize.”

This flexible philosophy often conflicts with Quality Control, which prizes consistency over “poetry”. The Six Sigma Quality Control movement in particular clamps down on variability.

Strict discipline may be crucial in many forms of product development (otherwise you wind up with the Toyota brake recall). Yet strict quality control standards also sand out the more interesting attributes of product experience. Product development becomes a constant tug-o-war to standardize, not sterilize. How do you write a Quality specification for “poetry”?

When I worked on Häagen-Dazs, we had a lot of internal debates on Quality. We had two US factories, one in California and one in Maryland. The milk came from local farms. East coast milk inherently tastes slightly different from West coast milk because the diet for the cows is different. Yet, our goal was to ensure that West coast ice cream tasted the same as East coast ice cream. Why exactly? Why does Quality Control have to mean absolute consistency? Consumers expect wine brands to taste different from year to year because of crop variability. Why not other products?

Our Mango ice cream created tension because the mango pieces were not consistently sized. Each pint had large pieces and small pieces, as if they were hand-cut, not machine-cut. Consumers liked the variability. Yet, Quality Control wanted to pick one consistent size. It was easier to design a specification that way.

Why can’t mass-produced products accept some variability? Jones Soda features different labels each time you drink them. It is those differences that create drama and interest. Quality is important. But that doesn’t mean that brands should become plastic flowers.

In London last week, I happened across Mark Ritson’s column in Marketing Week: “Hoodwinked by the Emperor’s New Tweets”. The title alone sparked this cartoon idea.

Mark lampoons the social media bandwagon, particularly the herd mentality to incorporate social media into each and every marketing plan and the gullibility of marketing directors to believe all the hype. He writes, “Most brands don’t have the newsworthiness, broad appeal or dynamism to have any chance of making Twitter work for them.”

I think that statement is true. And I agree that attempting social media without “newsworthiness” or “dynamism” is simply expensive window dressing. But, I don’t think that this is result of a limitation of Twitter or any other social media platform. I think this is the result of a limitation of the brand.

Brands have the obligation to be “newsworthy” and “dynamic”. Start there, not with social media. I’m a big fan of a quote from Kathy Sierra: “Please, businesses, don’t DO ‘social media’. Do ‘user happiness’, which may, or may not, require use of social media tools.” Social media will not make a dull brand more meaningful.

Eric Ryan who founded method in the mundane category of household cleaning likes to say, “There are no commodity categories. Only commodity brands.” It’s the impetus of each and every brand to rise above commodity status. Or it risks becoming irrelevant next to cheaper private label.

Only once a brand is truly meaningful to consumers does it earn the opportunity to have relationships with them. And I believe those relationships often can be made stronger through the use of social media tools.